The Appointment of Mark Malloch Brown Will Strain U.S.-BritishRelations

About the Author

The appointment of Sir Mark Malloch Brown as the U.K.'s new
minister for Africa, Asia, and the United Nations is the clearest
sign yet of a break with the pro-U.S. stance of the Blair
government. Malloch Brown, who served as chief of staff and deputy
to former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, is well known for his
stridently anti-American views and fierce opposition to the war in
Iraq. Although Malloch Brown will not be a full member of Gordon
Brown's Cabinet, he will be entitled to attend some cabinet
meetings and is expected to become one of the most powerful voices
in British foreign policy after David Miliband, the newly appointed
Foreign Secretary (and also a critic of the Iraq war and Tony
Blair's support for Israel). His selection sends a clear signal
that the Brown government will adopt a more openly critical stance
toward U.S. foreign policy.

A Critic of U.S. Foreign Policy

Malloch Brown served as Kofi Annan's chief aide during the
investigations into the massive U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal and
played a lead role in downplaying the U.N.'s failings,[1]
bringing him into conflict with the Bush Administration and leading
Senators and congressmen who were pressing hard for reform of the
world body. Before joining the Secretary-General's office, Malloch
Brown was head of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), a
dysfunctional U.N. agency that has recently become embroiled in a
series of major scandals.

As a U.N. official, Malloch Brown was an outspoken critic of
American leadership on the world stage and a constant thorn in the
side of the United States. He launched an unprecedented attack on
Washington's approach to the U.N. in a speech in New York in June
2006, despite the fact that Washington gives over $5 billion a year
to the U.N. system--more than France, Germany, China, Canada, and
Russia combined. Malloch Brown warned of the "serious consequences
of a decades-long tendency by U.S. Administrations of both parties
to engage only fitfully with the U.N." and condemned "the
prevailing practice of seeking to use the U.N. almost by stealth as
a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its
domestic critics."[2] He singled out for particular criticism
Washington's decision to opt out of joining the disastrous new U.N.
Human Rights Council, despite the fact that it was no better than
the discredited former Human Rights Commission.[3]

Malloch Brown could barely disguise his contempt for the
American public and media, speaking of "unchecked U.N.-bashing and
stereotyping" and a "U.S. heartland [that] has been largely
abandoned to its [the U.N.'s] loudest detractors, such as Rush
Limbaugh and Fox News." What was needed in response, he argued, was
for America's leaders to support the U.N. "not just in a whisper
but in a coast to coast shout, that pushes back the critics
domestically, and wins over the skeptics internationally."

The speech was also an extraordinary intervention in domestic
American politics. In what can only be described as the first stump
speech by an international civil servant on U.S. soil, Malloch
Brown rallied his largely liberal audience[4] with these stirring
words:

Back in Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's day, building
a strong, effective U.N. that could play this kind of role was a
bipartisan enterprise, with the likes of Arthur Vandenberg and John
Foster Dulles joining Democrats to support the new body. Who are
their successors in American politics? Who will campaign in 2008
for a new multilateral national security?[5]

Malloch Brown's remarks were rightly described by then-U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton as "condescending and
patronizing" and "a very serious affront" to the American people.
Bolton called on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to repudiate his
deputy's comments, which he viewed as "the worst mistake" by a U.N.
official in a quarter century.[6]

Malloch Brown's intervention was symptomatic of an increasing
tendency among U.N. officials to openly criticize American foreign
policy. Kofi Annan had sparked a major controversy in September
2004, just weeks ahead of the U.S. presidential election, when he
described the war with Iraq as an "illegal" violation of the U.N.
Charter in an interview with the BBC. Annan followed these remarks
with a further intervention on the Iraq issue in November 2004,
when he wrote a letter to U.S., British, and Iraqi leaders
appealing for Coalition forces to hold back from retaking the
insurgent-held city of Fallujah.

Malloch Brown's New York speech echoed a 2005 commencement
address he delivered at Pace University School of Law,[7] in
which he launched a stinging attack on what he perceived to be
America's lack of respect for international law. In his remarks,
Malloch Brown painted the United States as an uncooperative
superpower that acts outside of the rules, without respect for
others:

And it's clear that abroad, President Bush's push for democracy
and freedom will run aground on the shoals of American
exceptionalism if the United States keeps apart from this emerging
international legal system. While the U.S.'s involvement has made
the World Trade Organization a powerful facilitator of free trade
and global growth, elsewhere, America stands apart. The United
States is the country that has opposed the International Criminal
Court, the Kyoto Protocol on the environment, even UNICEF's
convention on the rights of the child.

Because this great ungainly magnificent giant of a nation that
has led the world in advancing freedom, democracy, and decency
cannot quite accept membership of the global neighborhood
association, and the principle of all neighborhoods--that it must
abide by others' rules as well as its own. It certainly doesn't
want to paint its picket fence the same color as the neighbors and
won't turn down the dance music at a sociable hour . . . Yet
respect for law, for other people's laws as a basis for building
shared international law is not only a calculus of foreign policy,
it is also a reflection of respect for other cultures and points of
view and therefore as relevant to the United States as to
others.

More recently, Malloch Brown took another swipe at Washington in
a London speech, blaming the U.S.-British-led invasion of Iraq for
"a loss of credibility" for humanitarian workers serving in trouble
spots such as Darfur who are no longer seen as neutral: "Iraq is
the immediate cause for this. And 9/11 the preceding trigger, but
both come at the end of a process that has knocked humanitarian
work off the straight and narrow of non-impartial help."[8]

A Barrier to Anglo-American
Cooperation

Other than outspoken former International Development Secretary
Clare Short, few, if any, British politicians are more disdainful
of U.S. foreign policy than Mark Malloch Brown. His appointment is
a slap in the face of the Anglo-American alliance and does not bode
well for relations between the Brown government and the Bush
Administration.

Faced with the rising threat of global terrorism, the insurgency
in Iraq, counteroffensives by the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the
looming threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, the next few years will be
a critical time for U.S.-U.K. relations. It is imperative that
London and Washington work together in addressing the major
international issues of the day, which will involve close
cooperation on the U.N. Security Council. It is hard to see how
Malloch Brown's appointment to the British government will help to
advance the special relationship.

Nile Gardiner,
Ph.D., is Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for
Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis
Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation.
Intern Joseph Cutler assisted with research for this paper.

[1] See Nile Gardiner, Ph.D., "An Assessment
of the Volcker Interim Report and the Independent Inquiry Committee
Into the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program," Testimony before the
House Subcommittee on International Oversight and Investigations of
the Committee on International Relations, February 9, 2005, at
www.heritage.org/Research/InternationalOrganizations/tst020905a.cfm.

[4] The audience included former Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright and Democrat financier George Soros, who
also happened to be Mark Malloch Brown's landlord. See "Losing the
United Nations," The New York Sun, June 8, 2006, at www.nysun.com/article/34079.

Just weeks before his appointment to the British government,
Malloch Brown was made vice president of Soros's multi-billion
dollar Quantum Fund. See Benny Avni, "Ex-Deputy UN Chief Joins with
Soros," The New York Sun, May 7, 2007, at www.nysun.com/article/53955.